Annual auction at the Great Yorkshire Showground saw more than 470 motor car, motorcycle and automobilia lots sell for a combined total of £1,096,483, and a sale rate of 94 per cent.
The 2012 Bonhams auction at the Great Yorkshire Showground in Harrogate was another huge success for the Bonhams motoring team. The entire sale realised just short of £1.1 million from 65 motor cars, 100 motorcycles and more than 300 lots of automobilia.
In the motor car section, a ‘barn-find’ 1965 Ferrari 330GT 2+2 Coupe restoration project exceeded expectations to sell for £68,700, more than double its pre-sale estimate. Other lots that sold well included a 1950 Delahaye Type 135M Coupe (£55,200) and a 1933 MG Midget J2/J4 Sports (£44,850). Meanwhile an eight-seater 1931 Rolls-Royce 20/25hp Shooting Brake once used as an ambulance sold for £35,667. Among the more unusual lots at the auction, a c.1945 Military Field Kitchen beat its top estimate to sell for £2,300, and a 1951 Guy Otter Pantechnicon Panel Van complete with livery from the Silentnight Company realised £12,075.
In the motorcycle section, the top-selling lot was a wonderfully original 1950 Vincent-HRD 998cc Rapide Series C with only two recorded keepers from new, which exceeded its pre-sale estimate to sell for £28,750. Some 97 per cent of the lots offered sold, many well above their top estimates. These included a 1959 Velocette 499cc Venom (£7,475), a 1922 New Imperial 347cc Sports (£6,900) and a 1983 BMW 798cc R80G/S (£5,175) – the latter generating a lot of interest at auction. A number of trials machines also did well on the day, including a 1956 Ariel 499cc HT5 Trials Motorcycle, which realised £6,440.
Automobilia was an almost complete sell-out success, with the top-selling item a rare and original RAF operations room Sector clock, which – after a tenacious bidding battle between two determined bidders – sold for nearly seven times its top pre-sale estimate at £10,250.
Tim Schofield, Head of the Bonhams UK Motor Car Department, said:
This was one of the busiest Harrogate sales I’ve witnessed over the past 10 years or so: we must have had more than 1,000 people attending. It was a great success. There was something for everyone with nearly all the 477 lots finding new homes during a marathon auction that took over 10 hours.
As a team we now look forward to our final sale of the UK season at Mercedes-Benz World Brooklands in Surrey, for which we have some fantastic consignments including a Hawker Hurricane aircraft, the speedboat used in the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, and of course the Ford Box Van that featured as Lance Corporal Jones’s butcher’s van in the classic television series ‘Dad’s Army’.
